Site Mobile Navigation

PRACTICAL TRAVELER; On the Alert for A Bad Ice Cube

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

WHEN we visited our son when he was in college in Bogota 10 years ago, I asked with some embarrassment about drinking the water. He snorted and said the water at the Hilton was as safe as at home. Since his arrival there, he had not reported being ill, so I followed his lead. But when we traveled to San Andres Island, Colombia, he took one look at the tap in the hotel room there and said: ''Not this water.''

We parents returned home with nothing worse than too much sun, but it was probably a coincidence. It is not the way the spigot looks but the invisible things in the water that get you. Those sparkling clear, fast-running streams can be as full of chemical nasties as a stagnant pool.

While I am unenthusiastic about the weight of bottles in my suitcase, I now think of carrying bottled water because I have begun to restrict what I drink on jet planes, and have developed some new sanitation guidelines based on what I see in hotels, however modern they may be and however shiny their taps.

Like a lot of people on planes, I get dehydrated and dry-mouthed. But recently I stopped drinking water from the little bulkhead spigots because there is no way to know where the water was put aboard. If the tank was filled from a place where you would not drink the water, its storage in a silver jet is not going to cleanse it.

Giardiasis is a parasitic infection that can be picked up from water, and the Merck Manual, a medical desk reference, says the organism Giardia lamblia is widely distributed and is common in ''warm, moist climates,'' especially where sanitation is rudimentary. But the parasite has been encountered in Aspen, Colo., and Moscow, so it is probably not wise to assume that only water put aboard in the Caribbean is a cause for worry. Giardiasis infection rates, Merck says, are ''high'' among travelers.

What to drink on a plane? Beverages from cans, cartons or bottles. I avoid anything carbonated because I am one of those who swell up in flight. Even when I consume nothing, my waistband is too tight after 20 minutes in the air. The airlines say that their pressurization is adjusted to nearly ground level, but my body testifies that the crew must be saving fuel as much as possible by thrifty pressurization. My choice for airplane thirst is usually tomato juice because it is predictable, but sometimes I spy the better-tasting orange juice not rebuilt from concentrate and ask for that. I don't worry a lot about the carton's being open because I believe it comes aboard sealed and the attendant opens it.

My next trans-Atlantic flight, I will probably carry aboard a plastic bottle of commercial water. Every pint will add a pound to the luggage on the way to the plane, but I believe the weight will be worthwhile. A friend asked me how I felt about the lettuce in the airline salad, and my answer is that I am not that anxious yet.

Care should be exercised in using ice cubes from unknown places. Freezing does not destroy all problems, but merely slows up their multiplication, so ice shares the problems of the water that made it. The Federal Centers for Disease Control, in detailing an outbreak of gastroenteritis first reported in Philadelphia last fall, said that ice ''had rarely been implicated as a vehicle of infection'' in the United States but this outbreak probably affected 5,000 people.

Dr. Roger I. Glass, the head of the viral and gastroenteritis laboratory for the centers, said he would not have anticipated a problem with ice in Philadelphia, ''but if you're in an area where you are worried about the water, you should be worried about the ice as well.''

Even in government prose, the tracking of the source of the outbreak, at the University of Pennsylvania-Cornell football game in Philadelphia on Sept. 19, and smaller outbreaks later, has elements of a mystery story. It proved to be ice manufactured in Pennsylvania in an area where the wells had been flooded by waters from Conestoga Creek in a torrential rainfall.

Experienced travelers and even physicians say that soft drinks are slightly acidic and alcohol is a disinfectant and that both will attack bacteria, so a Coca-Cola with ice or a whisky sour with ice in Mexico will probably not hurt you. But the implication of the ice in the Philadelphia outbreak, the Government publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report said on Nov. 6, raises doubts on this wisdom. ''The high attack rates of diarrhea among people who ingested ice with alcoholic or carbonated beverages,'' the report said, ''are striking because each of these beverages should have some disinfectant effect. Furthermore, since ice is not consistently controlled by any state or Federal agency, jursidiction for maintaining the quality of commercially produced ice or for recalling already distributed ice is unclear. Some of the containers of ice involved . . . did not carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and none were marked with the production date. Consequently, tracing the extent of the outbreak and determining which ice to recall was difficult.''

A NEW YORK neurologist learned the ice lesson in Indonesia. So careful was he about the water in a country where sewage often gets into the water supply that he even brushed his teeth with bottled water, he said. But he absent-mindedly put ice cubes in his Scotch and soda and picked up three serious parasites, including Giardia. Treatment with metronidazole, which kills the parasites, took three weeks. One of the strictures for people being treated with this, appropriately, is that they may not drink alcohol.

Another piece of fascinating, if non-mealtime, reading is ''Sanitation Management, Strategies for Success,'' a textbook by Ronald F. Cichy published by the Educational Institute of the American Hotel and Motel Association at Michigan State in East Lansing. I learned about this book while reading some tough advice directed to cost-conscious hotel managers by a lawyer, Anthony Marshall. Mr. Marshall warned these managers that if they gave their staffs the idea that saving money came before safety, they were opening the way to potentially destructive lawsuits.

Did you ever see a bartender scoop up ice with a glass? You were watching a dangerous procedure. If the glass breaks, the ice bin should then be hosed with hot water until it is empty, then washed before it is refilled. Otherwise the broken glass can remain. These safety steps are time-consuming and expensive, and, Mr. Marshall points out, not likely to be carried out by an insecure employee or one who has just been chastised about costs.

Forks can emerge even from home dishwashers with food baked into the tines. When this happens in a restaurant it seems to me to require only a request for a new fork, not an abrupt departure. Supervision may be lax, but presumably the silverware has been through a washing at a temperature high enough to sanitize it, even if no one would knowingly eat with it.

But the sanitation textbook teaches that used plates and clean plates should not be mixed in the serving area. For the same reasons, it counsels that plates with food on them should not be stacked on top of each other along the waiter's arm, but should be served from a tray. Glassware should be handled by the stem, not by the lip, and cracked cups should not be used. Those plastic shields over the salad bar are called sneeze guards, and their placement should respond to their function.

The textbook creates a typical customer who is sharp-eyed about such matters and resolves not to return to a hypothetical restaurant. It calls this section ''The Most Crucial Inspection,'' stressing that it is customers and not regulatory agencies that can destroy an establishment.

From the standpoint of health and safety, if you notice a sufficient number of such management failures, you may be wise to take your business elsewhere before you eat. Or before you even have a drink with ice.

A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 1988, on Page 10010003 of the National edition with the headline: PRACTICAL TRAVELER; On the Alert for A Bad Ice Cube. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe